Thursday, December 30, 2010

In the beginning of this month, I made a post about this movement started by UNICEF for the development of under privileged children. Awaaz Do, (the name of the movement) provides us a platform to ensure that no child in this country is denied his/her basic right to education.

Since then, this movement has been going really strong and have been achieving its targets. Recently Bollywood actress, Priyanka chopra joined hands for the same. I am sure this would bring more and more people to join this movement.

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Yeah, that was my story in 5th semester. The semester after which I should be 5/8th of an engineer (mathematically..!). It just began and is about to end. Today I gave 1st of my six papers and ope I am finally done with DCS. No more of it, please..!

But whatever be the case I have my exams line up now, 30th, 1st, (yeah, you read it right..! 1st day of new year, 1-1-11, and my university have appointed me for a paper. Just imagine..!!), and going on till 8th of Jan. After that I hopefully would be a free bird and would be catching on the party scene, though would be missing the new year bashes... :(

And as the tradition goes, my semester exams have started, and so the movie time..!!
If you want more about the tradition regarding exams, refer to these posts..!!

Thursday, December 23, 2010

A quote in Time's Magazine describing the greatest player of all time to play cricket, Sachin Tendulkar.

"When Sachin Tendulkar traveled to Pakistan to face one of the finest bowling attacks ever assembled in cricket, Michael Schumacher was yet to race a F1 car, Lance Armstrong had never been to the Tour de France, Diego Maradona was still the captain of a world champion Argentina team, Pete Sampras had never won a Grand Slam.

When Tendulkar embarked on a glorious career taming Imran and company, Roger Federer was a name unheard of; Lionel Messi was in his nappies, Usain Bolt was an unknown kid in the Jamaican backwaters. The Berlin Wall was still intact, USSR was one big, big country, Dr Manmohan Singh was yet to "open" the Nehruvian economy. It seems while Time was having his toll on every individual on the face of this planet, he excused one man. Time stands frozen in front of Sachin Tendulkar. We have had champions, we have had legends, but we have never had another Sachin Tendulkar and we never will."

Thursday, December 16, 2010

ColorNote is a notepad app for Google Android with a handful of cool features that make it useful not just for taking notes, but for setting reminders and writing to do lists.

First, you can create two types of notes, a text note or a checklist. Both types of notes can be color coded, so if you like to mark all of your gardening tasks in green and all of your schoolwork in yellow, you can do that.

If you choose the checklist, you can add as many items as you like and use the edit window to rearrange the order. When you pull up an existing checklist, all you have to do is tap on an item to cross it off, making ColorNote a handy app for creating shopping lists or other to do lists.

You can also search your notes or sort them by the time they were created, by color, or alphabetically. And you can set reminders for any note, so if you create a note reminding you to call the dentist, for instance, your phone will bug you with a reminder at a set time.

ColorNote also includes a home screen widget that you can use to add a shortcut to any note to your home screen. You can tap the shortcut to pull up that individual note or checklist without first having to open the full program. The shortcuts are labeled with the name of the note and use the same color you assigned to the note in ColorNote.

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

GoDaddy.com provides promo code for obtaining a discount on the purchases at GoDaddy. When you purchase a domain name at the GoDaddy registrar you are either purchasing a new name or renewing a domain you already own. At checkout, before you pay you are able to enter a coupon code on the page and click to recalculate. By doing so you will receive a discount on both a new domain or a renewal.

Saturday, December 11, 2010

Chrome users who appreciate having the latest and greatest things will be pleased to know that version 8 of Google's Web browser has debuted in stable form. Version 8.0.552.215 has been launched officially on 2nd December 2010.

Fair warning: don't expect this new release to revolutionize your online experience. The biggest single change the average user is likely to notice appears to be the integration of the PDF viewer we've been following since mid-June.

Google ChromeQuite a lot has been altered under the hood, however. A post on the Google Chrome Releases blog noted that Chrome 8 benefits from "over 800 bug fixes and stability improvements," so users are sure to be much better off.

More than a few independent researchers are better off thanks to Chrome 8, too, in the sense that Google's bug bounty program continued to achieve results. The blog post listed five different problems people were paid $500 or $1,000 for discovering.

The post stated, as well, "We'd also like to extend thanks to Sergey Glazunov and Marc Schoenefeld for finding bugs during the development cycle such that they never reached a stable build."

Friday, December 10, 2010

Phones with Google's Android are being baked and sent to the market one after the other. This open-source mobile operating system has been more than a blessing to many phone makers, who had the expertise in making the hardware, but didn't really have a polished OS with enhanced functionality to run them on. The best part about Android is that it's free for any manufacturer to take and slap on their devices. Also, there isn't a stringent hardware checklist to follow, unlike Microsoft's Windows Phone 7.

This enables companies to roll out cost-effective smartphones that are within the reach of many. Not to say that they have to compromise on certain features to get that price down, and the degradation in the performance of these when compared to the flagship Android phones is noticeable. But considering the lackluster interface, laggy performance and fragmented availability of apps on phones that were sold before Android was born, things definitely have gotten better.
Some of the phones under that fall in these categories are:

LG Optimus P500

Sony Ericsson XPERIA X8

Samsung Galaxy 3 i5801

HTC wildfire

Motorola Quench XT3

Dell XCD35

Most of these 'cheaper phones' running on android OS have these basic features:

Touchscreen Phones: The interfaces are intuitive, the touch response is accurate. Or we can say, touchscreens are really in these phones.

They are 3.5G ready (i.e. HSDPA compatible). This is good since we're witnessing private operators roll out 3G services one by one. Other forms of connectivity i.e. Wi-fi, Bluetooth and data cable are present as well. Lastly, all have a GPS chip that is necessary for extremely nifty apps like Google Maps.

These have capacitive screens that are optimized to be used with fingers.

They also happen to have accelerometers for automatic rotation of the content on the screen according to the way you hold it.

Apart from other basic features like, they all can make a call..!! Have the ability to store your data and can also be used to send SMS/MMS..!!

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Who doesn't like a free truck game, where you get to be behind the wheel of the powerful Bigfoot? In this game, you can race on tough terrain against dangerous opponents.

You race off-road, since there are no roads or road signs. Go where you want and explore the terrain and surroundings. You can perform all types of acrobatics such as flips and head-spinning jumps and get your adrenaline racing. Download this free game and you will not repent.

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Edomodo is a social network designed for teacher/student interaction with an emphasis on quick communication, polling, assignment sharing, and more.

Edmodo is a teaching tool modeled after social networks with a focus on communication and not merely distribution of information from the teacher and grade reporting, although you can certainly use those functions easily enough. As an educator you can share files, links, assignments, and grades as well as issue alerts and updates, dialogue with your students on a Facebook-like wall, survey your students, and manage map out your class syllabus on a public calendar. As a student you can contact your instructors directly, message other students, interact in the public discussion spaces, and even access Edmodo from your mobile phone via their mobile-optimized page to check assignments and more.

Edmodo is a free service. Visit the Edmodo Guide and read a detailed breakdown of the teacher and student features.

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Last week, I was developing a video and required some background music for it. In general, I make a friend of mine to prepare the musical composition required for my video but this time she was not in town. And I had to finish off the video, so I fed the big brother about my requirements and it threw up some interesting resources for Royalty-Free music. Royalty free music means that you either download music tracks for free or you pay a one-time fee to gain access to music. Then, you can do everything the original artist allows you to make with it and for as many times as you want.

Here I share some of the Royalty-Free music services.

Jamendo

Jamendo is an online music community where musicians publish their songs in a royalty-free fashion under a Creative Commons license. Jamendo is free to join and you don't even have to register to download music. Tracks are available either in the MP3 or the OGG file formats and you can download any song by receiving a link at your email address or using P2P sharing networks.http://www.jamendo.com/

Opsound

Opsound is a royalty-free music service where you can download free, open music tracks without even registering. All music tracks submitted by indie artists are licensed under a Creative Commons license and are also available for commercial use. Downloads are either available in the OGG or the MP3 file format. No Pro account is available.http://opsound.org/

WikiLeaks is currently not available at WikiLeaks.org. It recently lost its DNS service provider, and the site itself has been battered by DDoS attacks for more than a week now – ever since it first started releasing secret embassy cables.

However, when highly coveted information once spreads on the web, there’s no stopping it. Case in point: WikiLeaks currently has several hundred mirrors, and although some of these mirrors are incomplete, slow or perhaps even completely unavailable, it’s highly unlikely that any effort will be able to exterminate them all.

Obviously, WikiLeaks was never about one website. As large U.S. companies such as Amazon and PayPal fold under pressure, refusing to give service to WikiLeaks, thousands of enthusiasts help WikiLeaks out by hosting a mirror of the site, uploading a torrent with the latest cables or by donating to the site.

Some of them do it because they are advocates of free speech, some of them do it because they support the cause, and some do it just for the heck of it. And with simple instructions on how to set up a WikiLeaks mirror readily available, anyone can do it. The result? Regardless of what any nation, company or organization wants, WikiLeaks isn’t going away.

Recently, I came across this beautiful song describing Facebook and Twitter addicts..! Or I can say, depicting half the online population..!! An amazing piece of music and though its funny, it's true too. This is really Hilarious..!!

A social network song for Facebook and Twitter addicts.
Conceived and created by World Wide Wadio (with apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein).
Keynote animation by Dave Fey Design. http://www.wadio.com/favoritetweets.html

Lyrics:

Posting and blogging and chatting and tweeting
While both pretending we're part of this meeting
I friended you and then you followed me
We began networking socially

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Recently I came across a startling fact that 8 million children in our country are denied their basic right to education. With the Right to Education Act making education free and compulsory, we must now join hands to help these children exercise this right.

UNICEF has started a movement Awaaz Do that provides us a platform to ensure that no child in this country is denied his/her basic right to education. I have joined this movement and I urge you to pledge your support to the cause.